The several simultaneous
events that make up 'The Edinburgh Festival' - the International
Festival, the Fringe, the Comedy Festival, etc. - bring literally
thousands of shows and performers to the Scottish capital each August.
Virtually all of these shows tour after Edinburgh, and many come to
London, so the Festival is a unique preview of the coming year.

No one can see more than
a small fraction of what's on offer, but even with a reduced reviewing
team we were able to cover almost 150. Once again, our thanks to
Edinburgh veterans Duska Radosavljevic and Philip Fisher for
contributing to these pages.

Because
the list is so long, we have split it into two pages. The reviews are
in alphabetical order (soloists by last name), with A-L on
this page and M-Z
on another.

ABFCAP - The Life And
Rhymes Of Ian Dury Zoo [Transfered to London as
HIT ME! - The life and....]
Openly a celebration of and love letter to the singer-songwriter who
produced some of the wittiest lyrics of the punk rock era (the title is
an acronym of one of his more obscene songs), Jeff Merrifield's play
catches Dury at three points from his peak in the 1980s to his death in
2000. While the dramaturgy is rudimentary, generally consisting of Dury
and his friend/minder/roadie Fred 'Spider' Rowe either telling each
other things they already know or taking turns addressing the audience
directly with memories and anecdotes, the details and performances do
accumulate to build a living portrait of the man with all his flaws and
contradictions. It would have been easy to make him just a generic bad
boy of rock'n'roll, but Merrifield makes believable connections between
Dury's childhood polio, which left him crippled, and both his creative
energy and his dissipation of it. The guy who could be loved and hated
by those around him in almost equal measure was paradoxically as happy
with a cup of tea as with a bottle of brandy, content to alternate
cutting-edge rock with TV ad voiceovers. Supported by Josh Darcy's
exasperated and loving Spider, Jud Charlton not only does a spot-on
impersonation of Dury, both speaking and singing, but creates a
rounded, sympathetic character you don't need to know the original to
respond to. Gerald Berkowitz

Absolution Assembly
In the category of subjects we'd really rather not think about,
pedophile priests must rank high. And yet the subject does keep arising
in fringe drama, almost as frequently as it does in the news. Owen
O'Neill's play, in which he stars, approaches the subject a bit
obliquely, by being the monologue of a man who is a self-appointed
avenging angel for all the abused children. In a bare room that might
be a prison cell, he exercises and hardens himself as he describes the
murders of several guilty priests. Just who he is and why he is on this
crusade is kept from us until a surprise ending. But along the way even
the gory details of his killings are overshadowed by his intense and
eloquently expressed sense of justice and justification. O'Neill,
better known to many as a stand-up comic, demonstrates a control and
intensity that make the man frightening even as he hangs tenuously on
to our sympathy. Gerald Berkowitz

A Cold Slap Down Under
Argyle
Despite their mutual liking for Facebook and potentially some shared
distant origins from the British isles, as personalities and stand up
comedians Australian Marcus Ryan and Canadian James Uloth can't be more
different from each other. Perhaps proving that nurture is after all
more powerful than nature, at least they are each fairly representative
of where they come from. Warm and easygoing, Ryan banters effortlessly
about Edinburgh and the Fringe, long distance travel and his
consistently prominent smile-induced dimple. Uloth by contrast is dour
and somewhat miserable - his head constantly facing towards his navel,
even when he attempts a rather bold flirtation with a female member of
the audience - and his material seems to highlight a probably
inadvertent urination theme. However, the combined double bill would
probably cater for a nice variety of tastes in both humour and men, if
only they would also change the unappealing title of their act. As it
is, this is still probably one of the better comedy shows on the free
festival circuit and definitely worth a hike through the Meadows to the
breathtakingly antiquarian-looking Argyle. Duska
Radosavljevic

Aeneas
Faversham Forever Pleasance
It's a familiar Fringe genre - the small-cast mock melodrama that mixes
camp send-up with the fun of quick costume changes, recalcitrant props
and other gags that point at the silliness of it all. I have to say
that this offering from the trio called The Penny Dreadfuls is not the
best of the type I've ever seen, but it may well be the best available
this year. All the right elements are there - a cod Victorian plot
involving a sinister secret cult with designs on Tower Bridge, a hero
who doesn't seem able to avoid killing innocent bystanders, an
exploding horse, bad puns, absurd characters, funny shadow puppets and
an uncooperative fake moustache. But I can't help wanting more. It's
all a bit too leisurely when the genre demands high speed, not quite
over-the-top enough when excess is of the essence, not quite
self-referential enough when the screw-ups are part of the joke. You'll
laugh a lot, but not so much that you barely have time to breathe, and
that's the standard by which this genre is measured. Gerald
Berkowitz

All Dressed Up to Go
Dreaming C soco
Only eight audience members can be fitted into the meticulously
arranged world of this play. Set in a cellar, the show is nonetheless
fitted with all the accoutrements of a refined gentleman's library,
displays of roses and oranges included. Our hero, played with exquisite
poise by Arlo Hill, is similarly kitted out in a top hat, white tie and
tails, having just arrived from a night out at the opera. Regaling us
with his boundlessly erudite set of cultural references ranging from
Socrates and Shaw to Sinatra, the Minister slowly and gradually begins
to reveal a somewhat bedraggled secret life, helplessly ridden with
base instincts. I am guessing that what A.M. MacEachern's highly
literary 30 minute script is trying to achieve is a conceptual study of
an evident possibility of an intricate intertwining between
civilisation and violence in a single entity. Coming so soon after the
internationally significant arrest of a poet and psychiatrist turned
war criminal posing as a new age guru, this might indeed be a timely
exploration. A more explicit narrative and theatrical engagement with
the audience, however small, would help to clarify this, and I
certainly hope that the next draft of this play comes closer to it.
Duska Radosavljevic

Alpha Males Pleasance
Almost uninterruptedly hilarious, Adam Riches' gallery of macho men of
every stripe fills the hour with laughs and a range of comic styles
from the laid-back to the in-your-face. From the big game hunter who
doesn't lose his cool even as he's getting lost in his own syntax and
in jokes that seem to be going in one direction until they suddenly
take surprising turns, through the super-macho cop dismissive of
everyone else with the gall to claim a Y-chromosome, Riches' characters
are all funny in themselves while also scoring points as satire and
caricature. Other highlights in the fast-moving show are the
past-midnight TV quiz host hanging on in the face of phone-in derision,
the superannuated ex-boy band member who just won't give up, and the
Aussie sex expert willing to pair off any random male and female in the
audience though of course he could easily have either of them. Even the
costume changes are funny in this show that other comics should avoid
lest it lead them to quit in despair of ever being this good. Gerald
Berkowitz

The 'American', the
Coloured and Me Counting House
Largely designed to showcase the individual talents of the three
performers it brings together, it can be easily imagined that this show
set in an Edinburgh bar might indeed have been conceived on a similar
drinking occasion. A white and a coloured South African are joined by
an arrogant Canadian who tries to make sense of their political
legacies. In the meantime, they drink, sing, dance, perform stand-up
routines at an open mic competition, reminisce, recreate dream
sequences and share nostalgic memories of culinary delicacies from
home. Although Michelle and Jay van Rensburg's script features some
nice characterisations and interesting observations, structurally it is
a mixed bag difficult to grasp in terms of conventional dramatic
storytelling, which makes this piece a good candidate for professional
dramaturgical intervention. Michelle van Rensburg also appears as
attractive South African Vanessa alongside Cape Malay Ferial Puren,
whose singing and song-writing talent is truly outstanding, and the
evidently multi-talented Canadian Jennifer Larkin. And this is
definitely much more than can be said about a lot of the ticketed shows
at the Fringe. Duska Radosavljevic

And on Your Left... Ruth
Bratt Pleasance Dome
We are on a tour around Edinburgh being introduced to the city by
Kimberly, recently dumped by a boyfriend who is now performing at the
Fringe. By the end of our tour, we will have met an array of characters
ranging from Russian waitress Nikita and an American tourist on a
Princess Diana pilgrimage, to a miserable children's entertainer in a
ridiculous costume. By then, judging by the voice-over reports designed
to cover costume changes, Kimberley will have turned into a fully
fledged bunny-boiler. Ruth Bratt has evidently put some thought into
her sketch-show, but her creation, which bursts with originality and
talent, seems only half-baked. Having opted for a rather clever framing
device of a city tour, Bratt lets only some of her material take us
around Edinburgh, while the rest seems to detour around London and its
suburbs, without any plausible explanation for this change of scene.
Her performance too, which has the residue of a once enjoyable act,
seems technically accomplished but sometimes a bit lacklustre. Still,
you may be able to catch her tour bus on a better day than I did.
Duska Radosavljevic

The
Angel and the Woodcutter Zoo Southside
Returning after the last year's successful run at the Fringe, the
Korean company Cho-In offers another opportunity for this immensely
powerful piece of theatre to be seen. Drawing its origins from an
ancient Korean folk tale about an angel who is discovered bathing in a
stream by a woodcutter and his meddlesome mother. In Park Chung-euy's
retelling, featuring traditional and contemporary dance, mime, puppetry
and masks, of this simple fairy-tale with elements of domestic drama
evolves into an anti-war political parable of epic proportions which is
reminiscent of Brechtian theatre at its best. Chung-euy spares no time
or resources to paint a poignant and deeply human picture of the
horrors of war and their devastating effect on family life. Often
humorous and earthy and sometimes even mundane, this piece of highly
accomplished physical theatre is guaranteed to get through to anyone
regardless of age, nationality or even stylistic preference. Do make
sure to see it this time around as opportunities for such refreshingly
good theatre are extremely rare. Duska Radosavljevic

Another Kind of Silence
Hill Street
Employing what is essentially the standard and-then-I-wrote structure
of such shows, Liz Rothschild's portrayal of Rachel Carson is more
successful than many in evoking the personality and spirit of her
subject. The scientist-writer, best known for her 1962 book Silent
Spring, about the dangers of pesticides and other chemicals to nature
and eventually human health, did not have a dramatic life. She lived
and worked quietly for 55 years, wrote that very influential book, and
died soon after. So, without much of a story line, writer-performer
Rothschild devotes herself to communicating Carson's personality,
especially her deep love of nature and her conviction that her message
to the world was of immense and immediate importance. She is so
successful at creating a believable Carson that she can repeatedly let
the character step out of chronology to comment on 21st-century
ecological crises without destroying the illusion. This is a modest
piece, perhaps more suited to the school auditorium or WI meeting than
a theatrical setting. But it is a strong evocation of a voice as timely
today as a half-century ago. Gerald
Berkowitz

Another Paradise clubWEST
Sayan Kent's play is part black comedy, part dystopian political tract,
and its two strands sometimes sit uncomfortably alongside each other.
Set in a near future when national databases, biometric identity cards,
iris scanners and the like are ubiquitous, the play suggests that when
you are who the files say you are, then you yourself may be redundant.
A character whose identity is stolen becomes nobody, while a man whose
card says he is a woman is treated as a woman by everyone despite the
evidence before them. Those without cards are literally sent to
Coventry, the only place still with a cash economy, and rebellious
hackers who break into the system not only threaten to bring the whole
country to a halt but question everyone's sense of who they are. Like
many thesis plays, this one makes its point pretty quickly and then can
find nothing to do but make it again and again, but the comedy of
characters caught between the cracks in the system carries the hour.
Chand Martinez as the man who has to adjust to officially being a
woman, and Sakuntala Ramanee as the woman who discovers the freedom of
being nobody lead a cast directed by Janet Steel to play the humour
more comfortably than the politics. Gerald Berkowitz

Apes
Like Me C Soco
Sporting the demeanour of a likeable school teacher, Kate Smurthwaite
chats her audience into the auditorium as a means of stealthily
determining their demographic spread, and then proceeds with conducting
a cunning geek test, disguised as a joke. Geekiness is indeed the key
ingredient of Smurthwaite's show, which for the most part consists of
biology class material, although she will briefly examine the etymology
of various synonyms for vagina, while also dutifully counting her
carefully spread out 'bad puns' and distributing stickers to audience
members on the basis of their closest likeness to particular species of
primates. There is fun to be had in this hour of harmless banter,
intelligent design and some really good arguments for the evolutionist
vs. creationist debate, and above all it makes for a placid, pleasant
and relaxed comedy show. Rather than showing any urgency to make you
laugh or potential stress at not doing so, Smurthwaite is happy to send
you home simply enlightened - even if that only boils down to what kind
of an ape you are. Duska Radosavljevic

Architecting Traverse
Subtitled Part One to suggest that its collaborative development may
still not be complete, this co-production of the National Theatre of
Scotland and the American company The TEAM is a fluid, inventive and
perhaps overfull meditation on America's past and its uneasy
relationship with the conflicting impulses to embrace and erase it. In
a New Orleans roadhouse reality is shared by the living, the ghost of
Margaret Mitchell, the characters from Gone With The Wind, and Henry
Adams, the nineteenth-century historian paradoxically enamoured of both
medieval cathedrals and the vision of America's future. Add to them an
architect planning to replace hurricane ruins with a 'new traditional'
suburb designed to recreate feelings of the past and a film producer
planning an updated remake of GWTW, and the play has rich material for
exploring myth, history and the fantasy of progress. Mitchell envies
Adams his historian's objectivity, but he had to repress his
imagination and humanity to find it, and simply omitted twenty
uncomfortable years from his famous autobiography. The film producer
considers Mitchell a racist and tries to erase all images of slavery
from his film, but his African-American director actually responds to
her myth-making power. Real-world characters find themselves drawn into
the reality of the book, while Scarlett and the others respond to the
twenty-first century. Under Rachel Chavkin's fluid direction this
group-created work juggles its many levels of reality and points of
reference remarkably well for about two-thirds of its length, drawing
the audience in to its landscape and unforcedly raising its questions
and issues. But then everything abruptly changes as most of the
characters disappear, a new set of wholly realistic figures are
introduced, and their stories, which deal with a trip to New Orleans
which may have overtones of a quest for the past, are told in a wholly
new stage vocabulary of film, dance and cartoonish satire. The play
never really recovers from that loss of coherence, however interesting
the new characters or beautiful the new stage pictures, and the points
it was raising about America not being quite so eager to erase or
rewrite its often messy past may be lost in the confusion. Gerald
Berkowitz

Dan Atkinson - The Credit
Crunch and other Biscuits Pleasance
Dishevelled, restless and occasionally snappy, Dan Atkinson combines
the best of his idyllic Yorkshire heritage with the experience of being
a newly-settled, struggling Londoner to tell us all about his financial
and romantic concerns. He sports a no-nonsense demeanour, though his
rapport with the audience is friendly and unusually engaging. Not only
would he happily find a way of chatting to a cross-section of
spectators, but he will even weave them into the underlying narrative
of the show. Admittedly the latter will only become apparent following
the curtain call applause, but it will certainly be worth the wait. The
meantime, therefore, is filled with other forms of bonding and
community building but without too much blood-curdling audience
participation. Essentially, by the end of his act, Atkinson pretty much
manages to talk his audience into a sense of shared experience. And
even though age seems to be on his mind quite a bit in this show and he
bears a few grudges about his friends getting older, generationally his
humour is genuinely all-inclusive. Duska Radosavljevic

Baldanders Hill Street
Marcin Bikowski and Marcin Bartnikowski are the authors and performers
of this puppetry show with a difference. Apparently inspired by Borges,
Topor and Edgar Allan Poe, the duet have devised a five-act story in
which multiple figures take it in turns to elaborate and expound on the
notion of evil. None of it is in any way enlightening at any given
point, and although accompanied by Anna Witochowska's atmospheric cello
score, none of it is particularly pleasant either. Despite Kompania
Doomsday's having many international awards to its name, it is
difficult to see how these have been deserved beyond the basic level of
professional technical accomplishment and originality. This is
certainly not enough to sustain the audience's attention throughout the
70 minutes filled with gracefully attempted but largely
incomprehensible storytelling in English - posing the possibility that
the original Polish version might in fact have been more effective.
Over the years we have seen and enjoyed plenty of atmospherically and
visually stunning pieces of theatre from Eastern Europe without the
benefit of the English translation, but this one - however accomplished
- seems to fall well below the established standards. Duska
Radosavljevic

Beautiful People Don't
Travel Economy Sweet Teviot
Melbourne-based drag comic and former flight attendant Robert Yule dons
his girdle and wig to present the flight hostess from hell - or,
rather, from sleezyJet Airlines, and no one is safe. While many comics
pick on people in the front row, this big-busted, huge-hipped trolley
dolly roams the aisles dispensing insults, love advice and cheap wine
with abandon, in between giving her version of the usual announcements
('Place small children under the seat in front of you.') Yule's humour
could never be accused of being subtle, and much of it is standard drag
stuff, but he comes at you with such unrelenting energy that the best
thing to do is submit and enjoy yourself. It's bawdy, of course -
there's a very funny ad for specialised kneepads - and Yule stretches
what is basically a single joke a bit longer than it can handle, so his
switching wigs to play Russian and Black stewardesses doesn't really
add much. But you'll laugh a lot, and might even be one of the lucky
ones to have a bag of crisps tossed your way. Gerald
Berkowitz

The Bee
Underbelly
Matt Hartley's exquisite little gem of a play captures with delicacy
and understanding both the essence of adolescent loneliness and at
least one sort of thinking that could make suicide seem a reasonable
option - and, remarkably, in an hour that it at least as uplifting and
frequently comic as it is sad. Rebecca Whitehead plays a teenager who
just can't get in step with a world in which things like how many
Facebook 'friends' you have is a measure of your worth. When her
beloved brother dies in an accident, she finds her pain being usurped
by others in her small town, who set up a memorial website and rush to
claim some connection to him that earns them a piece of the grief. It
is through coming to recognise how empty their lives are and how
desperately they need this spurious attachment to something real that
she finds some meaning in her brother's death and some comfort for her
private pain. And that in turn leads her to think about a way she can
give something to the community. Whitehead movingly captures every step
in the girl's emotional journey, drawing and holding our sympathy even
as we dread the direction her thoughts are taking her. Sarah Sweeney
registers as well by finding all the pathos in a seemingly shallow and
airheaded schoolmate. Gerald Berkowitz

David Benson Sings Noel
Coward Assembly
Like it says on the label. David Benson, Fringe veteran best known for
his solo shows incorporating music into his monologues and for playing
Noel Coward in several episodes of the TV series Goodnight Sweetheart,
offers a straightforward (no pun intended) concert of some of the
Master's best- and least-known songs, from Parisian Pierrot and I Am No
Good At Love to the inevitable (and no less welcome for that) Mad Dogs
And Englishmen and I'll See You Again. This is Benson singing Coward,
not Benson as Coward - a few brief moments aside, he doesn't try to
imitate Coward's voice or singing style. But Benson has a pleasant
voice and the absolutely essential precise diction, and as an
actor-who-sings he brings out all the wit and sentiment in the wide
range of Coward's songs. By-play with his pianist Stewart Nicholls
sometimes gets a bit arch and strays into Kit and the Widow territory.
But anyone who loves the songs or needs an introduction to Coward the
songwriter will find a thoroughly satisfying and enjoyable hour. Gerald
Berkowitz

Beth Becomes Her
Baby Belly
Gok Wan, Marylin Manson and Harry Potter could all be seen to bear
resemblance to Bethany Black, as she will very helpfully profess
herself, though not without some irony. However, any possible grounds
for comparison with any familiar pop culture icon becomes very
difficult once Black reveals the rather unique subject matter of her
show - the predicament of being a 5'10" lesbian goth, although born as
a boy - and the way she got there. It is the deliberately glossed over
bits of medical detail concerning the difference between sexuality and
gender and the actual technicalities of the sex operation that betray
her sparkling intelligence which she skilfully transforms into witty
and somewhat cryptic punchlines. However, it is when she reveals that
she has actually calculated how much money she has saved the tax payer
by opting for a sex change rather than suicide that she wins over
potential secret nerds among her audience. With such a successful
combination of good story and gifted delivery, I doubt that her show
really needs a sentimental message which she works into the ending,
although it does remind us that we are in the territory of raw life
material, rather than the everyday malaise informing most of the other
comedy on the circuit. Duska Radosavljevic

Boys of the Empire C
venue
Glenn Chandler's play is a Ripping Yarns spoof set in a 1920s boys'
school, with the lads foiling some dastardly evil foreigners between
lessons, games and the first stirrings of sexuality. Its witty
highlights include the frequent interruptions by the editor of the
imagined boys'-own magazine for his manly letter to readers, along with
the magazine's ads for body-building courses and the like, and the
inevitable slips into innocent homosexual-tinged double entendre or
suspicious-looking poses by all the characters. Somewhat weaker are the
attempts at contemporary resonances in building the plot around the
1920s British occupation of Iraq and a performance mode that wavers
between woodenness and striving too hard to be camp, with everyone
prancing on and off stage. Too many potentially effective gags are
spoiled by being overdone, like the one boy a bit too eager to be
caned, or punched too heavily, rather than letting the jokes sneak up
on us. Director Patrick Wilde and his hard-working cast too rarely hit
the right parodic note, and the overall effect is of the material for a
tight and sharply comic half-hour stretched to a too-often flaccid
three times that length. Gerald Berkowitz

Breathing Corpses
Sweet Grassmarket
LS6 are a group of students from Leeds. In their publicity they are
completely honest about their credentials - this is their first
production together and presumably their first time at the Fringe. They
rise to their chosen task responsibly and to the best of their
different levels of ability, and they have made one crucial wise
decision in their process - they have chosen a good play, and they have
chosen it well. Laura Wade's multi-award winning play about love and
death has enough thematic focus and clarity for this young company to
tackle without any undue effort, while the episodic nature of the
Memento-style psychological thriller creates opportunities for short,
contained character studies and performance vignettes. Nathaniel James
playing two very different characters - Ray and Ben - gets to showcase
his versatility, while the rest of the cast all retain enough scope to
pursue small but manageable dramatic arcs. Their use of space and
scenery could have been more inspired, but certainly they are here to
learn and let's hope they are able to build further on this year's
evidently well learnt lessons. Duska Radosavljevic

Bully
Gilded Balloon
The title of Richard Fry's monologue is misleading, since the character
he plays is not a bully, but rather a man who spends his life in fear
that he might become a bully, only to discover that he has become a
victim instead. He tells of a childhood with a violent and abusive
father, and the conviction that textbook psychology requires history to
repeat itself, not realising that it was equally possible that he might
replicate his mother's role when he grew up, came out and found what
seemed to be the man of his dreams. That dark twist, and its tragic
results, come fairly late in the hour, much of which is devoted to the
lighter memories of childhood happiness stolen from the shadow of the
father and some of the more comic aspects of a young man's introduction
to the gay scene. The whole is written in unobtrusive and frequently
witty rhymed couplets, and indeed the whole tone of the hour is
understated and unsensational, Fry's performance consisting of little
more than sitting in a chair and telling the story, when more in the
way of acting it out or investing it with emotion could have enriched
it. Gerald
Berkowitz

Burtscher,
Goldstein and Howell Phoenix
Perhaps typical of not-ready-for-the-big-time comedians playing in pubs
around Edinburgh as part of the Free Fringe, Pat Burtscher, Brett
Goldstein and Gerry Howell share an hour costing nothing more than a
contribution to the hat passed at the end. Gerry Howell's mode appears
to be to meander aimlessly through his thoughts in hopes of stumbling
upon something funny, generally unsuccessfully. He seems to realise
this, though, and gets off quickly. Pat Burtscher affects a glum and
deadpan persona, directing his attention to life's losers - fat people,
premature ejaculators, failed comedians - but with his hand frequently
covering his mouth and his eyes fixed firmly on his shoes, he makes
little connection with the audience. By default, then, Brett Goldstein
is the most successful of the three. Though his set is rambling and
scattershot, he does have actual jokes built on a nicely skewed sense
of humour, imagining the British summer to be a Jeremy Beadle prank,
describing contacts with the gas company as a troubled love affair, and
offering an alternative image for James Bond. In all, though, the
impression you carry away from this bit of Free Fringe is that you get
what you pay for. Gerald
Berkowitz

By The Way
Pleasance
In Noelle Renaude's play, here in a translation by Clare Finburgh, two
blokes impulsively go on a road trip that winds up taking them nowhere.
The mother of one and the mother-in-law of the other have just died,
but that at first seems unrelated to their journey until it begins to
take on a dreamlike quality, with road signs speaking to them and
stimulating memories and flashbacks. It is perhaps not until we begin
to notice that many of the people they meet have dead or dying mothers
that we sense that the journey is as much metaphoric as real and that
they are travelling not so much to the sea as to an acceptance of their
grief. The problem is that I just made the play sound far more coherent
and affecting than it is in practice, where the thematically relevant
encounters are mixed in with others whose purpose is unclear. The two
performers, Stavros Demetraki and Kevin O'Loughlin, are unable to do
more than hint at their characters' psychology and buried emotions and,
as they are not very good at doing different voices, have trouble
establishing and distinguishing among the various other characters they
play. Gerald
Berkowitz

Jason Byrne ­ Cats Under
Mats Having Chats With Bats Assembly Hall
Whatever Jason Byrne's show is meant to be about, one thing is certain
- it will be different every night and it will always be ultimately
about you. As has been proven many times before, here we have a true
comedy talent - an excellent raconteur who is able to put his audience
at ease by just being his wonderful frivolous self and a master of
quicksilver wit. The night I saw the show happened to be a Sunday and
he managed to discover and incorporate into his show a sixteen year old
wannabe minister, whilst also matchmaking between two random audience
members from Southampton and diffusing potential tension caused by a
mysterious combustion in the auditorium - which incidentally provided a
humorous trail concerning terrorism. He has plenty of wacky but easily
recognisable material concerning his everyday family life which he will
squeeze in in between the audience banter and the Irish dance finale,
but you really must be there for the complete experience yourself. It
will be worth every minute of the hour and every penny of the admission
fee. Duska Radosavljevic

Simon Callow - A Festival Dickens Assembly
Continuing the theatrical association with Dickens that last saw him
touring his solo show The Mystery of Charles Dickens, Simon Callow now
offers a programme of two short stories that Dickens himself frequently
performed in his second career as a reader of his own works. Both
pieces display the signature Dickensian mix of broad comedy,
uninhibited sentimentality and colourful characters, and thus make an
ideal showcase for Callow's own larger-than-life style. 'Mr Chops - the
Dwarf' is the account, told by a circus owner, of one of his star acts
who won the lottery and entered society, only to find the high life
much less attractive than it seemed from the outside. 'Dr Marigold' is
the monologue of a pedlar whose adventures include the deaths of his
wife and daughter, the adoption of a deaf-mute girl, and the
bittersweet experience of watching her grow up, fall in love, and begin
a life of her own. The package therefore touches all the Dickensian
buttons by including three deaths, two tearful reunions, lots of light
comedy and a collection of secondary characters ranging from con men to
a lugubrious giant. Unlike Dickens, who read his works at a lectern,
Callow dons appropriate costumes and wigs and roams the stage, acting
out the scenes he describes and pulling all the comedy and pathos from
them. A week into his Edinburgh run, he seemed still unsure of his
lines, with frequent fumblings and ad lib vamping until he recovered
his place. His control over his chosen accents and character voices was
particularly unsteady, as he repeatedly moved in and out of character,
finally giving up midway through the second piece and finishing it in
his own voice. This programme has the potential for being another hit
for Callow, but with a running time almost half again as long as
announced, it will need further rehearsal and tightening up after its
Edinburgh tryout. Gerald
Berkowitz

Cambridge Footlights Underbelly The doldrums
may be over in the university revue world. After several weak years,
both Oxford (see our review) and Cambridge have come up with pretty
good shows. I'd rank Oxford's higher (and Durham University's even
higher), but Footlights is a good hour of laughs. There isn't much in
the way of erudition or high wit, but the whole is suffused with an
attractive sense of the absurd and incongruous, the best sketches going
off in directions you didn't anticipate. Highlights are an
Improv-for-schools troupe that forces every suggestion into their
prepared moral lessons, a cliche-filled business meeting, a nervous
speed-dater, competing parents on games day and a Woody Allen-ish
lonely guy monologue. The four guys and one girl may not have the next
Cleese or Fry among them, but right now they're among the funniest
companies in Edinburgh. Gerald Berkowitz

Caruso and the Quake Pleasance
Enrico Caruso didn't really want to be in San Francisco on that
national tour in 1905 anyway, and waking up to find the hotel room
collapsing around him didn't improve his mood. Andrew G. Marshall's
text takes the tenor on a triple journey, through the ruined city as he
and others try to escape, through memory that fills in his back story,
and from an egocentricity that makes him more concerned for his
precious costumes than for the suffering around him to an awareness of
and empathy for his fellow victims. It is that last thread, nicely
punctuated by episodes that have Caruso first singing to establish
himself as a VIP and later to attract a crowd's attention to a lost
child, that makes the monologue more than a standard and-then-I-sang
autobiography, and more of an actual play, with a character we can come
to respect and feel for. But a weakness of both the script and Miranda
Henderson's direction is that Caruso's internal growth doesn't become
evident until very late in the hour. As Caruso, Ignacio Jarquin
projects too little of the star's magnetism or ego, even in a small
Fringe room, and this piece would likely struggle to hold audiences in
any larger space. Gerald Berkowitz

Charlie Victor Romeo Underbelly
Pasture
Taking its title from the initials of Cockpit Voice Recorder, the
infamous 'black box' that survives airplane crashes, this group-created
piece takes verbatim theatre in a direction no one had previously
dared, by staging the final moments of six airline accidents, all but
one of them catastrophic. A cast of seven rotate in the small cockpit
set as projections identify each plane and introduce us to the moments
before something goes wrong. Despite a mounting body count, the
surprising effect is a reassuring one. While in a couple of cases the
crews have no time at all to react to the emergency, when they do, we
watch them generally responding with admirable courage and ingenuity.
The one exception is a 1996 Peruvian plane whose crew are so dependant
on the onboard computers that they resist taking manual control when
the systems fail, instead frantically searching through the instruction
book for help. In contrast, the pilots of a 1985 Japan Air Lines plane
and of a 1989 United flight prove extraordinarily valiant and ingenious
in finding ways around the equipment's failures, in the one case
unsuccessfully, in the other managing to fly a plane with virtually no
working controls. With suspense and tension built into the situations,
directors and actors successfully convey both the stress and the
professionalism of their briefly sketched-in characters. Gerald
Berkowitz

Circus
Oz - 30th Birthday Bash Assembly Hall
When a circus company is celebrating its thirtieth birthday you know
you must be in for a treat. All those years of successful repertoire
must hold a few gems of tried and tested audience-pleasing routines,
while the ageing trapeze ladies get to showcase all their dazzling
career highlights. With Circus Oz, however, you can ditch all such
expectations. To prove that they are still young at heart, they will
make a point of subverting every existing circus convention and putting
an original spin on every familiar technique. Thus you will be served
up such delights as a clowning routine on roller-blades, a lion tamer
in a hula hoop, and a bricklaying juggling act (builder's bum
included). I'll let you meet Eric - the talking dog with a penchant for
stand up comedy - yourself. And of course none of it is finished until
a pack of kangaroos has performed their somersaulting finale. However
it is the very final image of this show that really encapsulates Circus
Oz's attitude to their big day - their sprightliest, cheekiest,
youngest member entangled with the grandfather of the troupe in a
bubble gum prank gone wrong. Roll on decade four! Duska
Radosavljevic

Class Enemy
Lyceum Theatre
Nigel Williams's play about the state of education for the working
classes, whose original premiere took place a year before Margaret
Thatcher's ascent to power, is thirty years old this year. In what may
essentially seem like a Brixton take on Waiting for Godot, a group of
disaffected teenagers, left to their own devices, are trying to pass
the time by giving each other lessons, and in the process reveal their
fears and desires, pent up anger and often desperately bleak outlooks
on life. In his adaptation of the play set in post-war Sarajevo,
veteran Bosnian theatre director Haris Pasovic sets out to tap into the
zeitgaist and particularly the predicament of Bosnia's newer
generations. Harnessing the energy of his youthful ensemble, two of
whom are in fact rappers of politically controversial repute, Pasovic's
production is intended as a statement rather than an homage. In an
anticipation of the potential outcomes of the play's cultural
refraction, a British audience may easily miss the allegorical layers
of the piece which are more linked with the play's underlying concept
of a forsaken people than the notion of cultural or individual
character nuance. In other words, even though concerned with education
as one of its themes, this version of the play is by no means intended
to be didactic. It simply shows how the hopelessness, frustration,
poverty and helplessness responsible for the country's slide into the
war in the first place is far from being overcome. Duska
Radosavljevic

Nina
Conti
Pleasance
I really feel for Nina Conti. She is a very talented comic
ventriloquist who built her act on the incongruity of a prim and
embarrassed girl with a foul-mouthed monkey puppet. She's so good that
Monk sometimes seems to be ad libbing and catching her by surprise.
But, understandably, she's been trying to move beyond variations on the
same basic joke, with little success. Last year's show introduced new
dummies and new voices, but none really worked. Her new show is all
about breaking with Monk, and it actually backfires, exposing her
limitations and making her look weaker than she is. Much of it, like
giving Monk a Nina dummy or hypnotising her to release her inner Monk,
just doesn't work. And bringing in a puppet of her father Tom Conti is
a big mistake, because he sounds just like Monk and not like the actor
at all. An American vent named Terry Fader has recently raised the bar
enormously with dummies that sound like famous singers or actors. Nina
can't even get her own father's voice right. (Even worse, the Nina
puppet doesn't sound like Nina) And when the show imagines their
careers after separation and Nina ends up a pole dancer with talking
breasts, you can only feel embarrassed for her. So the show just proves
what it was designed to disprove, that Monk is the star of the act, and
Nina still hasn't found a way to move beyond him. Gerald
Berkowitz

Hal Cruttenden - Climbing Every Molehill Assembly
One of the secrets of all good art is that it manages to capture or
articulate something that appears perfectly obvious to the audience,
but in a way that no one else has done it before. That is exactly where
Hal Cruttenden taps into the art of stand-up comedy. Unlike most star
comedians, he is amiable, polite and seemingly uninterested in his own
sex appeal or in the subjects of sex, drinking and football. In fact,
he is a self-confessed member of the middle class, 'slightly political'
and 'slightly religious' (the latter is tongue-in-cheek but you'd
better hear the delightful explanatory punchline for yourselves). And
in the process of climbing the molehills and mountains of his everyday
fears, he imparts some really exciting views on wedding rituals, the
Olympics and the codes of conduct of various tradespeople. Certainly
not your typical comedian - and this is where he wins hands down over
most others. Instead of relying on tired, old cliches for his humour,
he actively sets out to attack and dismantle them, thus opening up
those obvious new ways of seeing the world. Immensely satisfying.
Duska Radosavljevic

Cure Baby Belly
Struck Dumb is a collective of young writers, directors and actors who
combine some mainstream professional theatre and TV experience with an
undying enthusiasm for comic-book style storytelling and fast paced
theatre. The result is a slick and engaging satirical farce with
elements of Hollywood thriller about a mildly futuristic society which
has found a secret cure for cancer - in cannibalism. Despite a slightly
ludicrous plot - which gets even worse towards the end, but without
ever losing its grip over the audience - the piece manages to pull off
a very high standard of theatricality on an extremely low budget. The
choice of venue - the Baby Belly caves - is put to good use, as are
also the quintet's costumes, while the very few props involve a sword,
a mobile phone and an apple. Beautifully lit and played with great
gusto, Cure is above all a wonderful example of just how much can be
achieved through talent, good vision and will power alone. Still, this
doesn't mean that someone should not give them some sponsorship pretty
soon. Duska Radosavljevic

Dad's Money
Pleasance Dome
Richard Marsh has an unusual sense of humour. In his play about sibling
rivalry, at one particularly charged point one brother attempts to
insult the other with the line: 'You look like a paedophile with two
dicks and three daughters'. It's no wonder then that Marsh actually
sets this entire hour of post-funeral bickering in a cellar somewhere
and amid the last summer's floods. The brothers - reunited for the
first time in years - are desperately looking for their father's piggy
bank. There might be some potential in a dramatic situation of this
kind, especially as the world of the play very quickly closes in on the
protagonists from all directions - the trap-door gets accidentally shut
and somehow covered by the piano, while the level of water slowly
rises. But Marsh does not seem to be particularly interested in
utilising the situation to search the depths, the pasts or any
speculative futures of the two characters in these circumstances - he
simply just lets them insult and annoy each other to death, while he
pursues his own writerly punchline of revealing the whereabouts of the
money. I guess this kind of humour might have a few willing customers,
but unfortunately, I'm not one of them. Duska Radosavljevic

Dark Grumblings
UnderbellyVery much the
sort of thing I come to the Fringe for, this offering from Big Wow is
fast-moving, inventive, hilarious and a showcase for its two very
talented performers. File this under 'Two Guys Play Several Roles Each
In A Silly And Very Funny Comedy.' In this case a couch potato idly
surfing the TV channels, a Polish TV repairman with a mystical bent,
two ill-matched security guards, a garrulous old lady and a couple of
gangsters - all played, in various combinations, by Tim Lynskey and
Matt Rutter - come up against the TV channel from hell, which is slowly
spreading through their building like the unseen monster in a cheap
horror movie. But the plot, what there is of it, is just the excuse for
quick changes and very rapid patter between the actors, who keep up a
rhythm of action and talk that is a master class in mutual support and
ensemble playing. And did I mention that it's very funny? Much credit
to dramaturge and director Robert Farquhar for keeping things spinning
without letting them get out of the performers' admirably tight
control. Forget the umpteenth student production of Macbeth - this is
what the Fringe is all about. Gerald Berkowitz

The Darkling Plain Underbelly
Unsurprisingly, the Middle East wars are a recurring subject of new
works at this year's Fringe, and Bea Roberts' play approaches the topic
from a surprising and therefore surprisingly effective and evocative
angle. On its surface, Roberts' play is a spoof of 1940s war movies,
with caricatured stiff-upper-lip gentry sending their men off to be
officers and colourfully cheeky working class families providing the
enlisted men. The joke, which extends to spot-on parodies of wartime
radio shows, is a delight throughout, with every cliche of the genre
hit and lovingly satirised, as when a soul-searching inner monologue
straight out of Brief Encounter is put in the mind of a soldier hardly
recognising the nature of his feelings for a buddy. Only the fact that
the war the men are off to is set in a desert rather than a European
battlefield hints at a deeper purpose to the play, but it is enough to
prepare us for the power of an ending that, while remaining true to the
film formula, is particularly resonant in the modern context. Comedy is
difficult, parody is difficult, establishing topical relevance without
preaching is difficult, and Roberts and her admirable cast succeed at
all of these in what is simultaneously one of the most enjoyable and
most touching hours of the Fringe. Gerald Berkowitz

Deep Cut Traverse
Between 1995 and 2002 four soldiers in the British training base at
Deepcut died from mysterious gunfire. Several inquiries by both the
military and police concluded that all were suicides, and indeed there
were a large number of failed suicide attempts there in the same
period. But the various investigations and inquiries were all so badly
handled that many questions and the suspicion of a cover-up remain.
Philip Ralph's play is based on the experience of the parents of one of
the four, Cheryl James. In the play, based on interviews with the
Jameses and others, their love for their daughter, their grief at her
death, and their difficulty accepting the idea of suicide are taken as
givens - the play is really about their frustration and rage at the
refusal of anyone to treat the case with objectivity and a search for
truth. Certainly playwright Ralph, by including the words of those on
the other side, does convey the sense that they grabbed at the suicide
explanation as a way of closing the books rather than looking beyond
it, and that the best that can be said of the official handling of the
cases is that they were bungled. Ciaran McIntyre invests Mr. James with
a solid dignity that never allows even the hint of irrationality or
obsession, while Rhian Morgan as Mrs. James and Rhian Blythe as a young
soldier very much like what their daughter might have been give solid
support. Gerald Berkowitz

Rob Deering - Boobs
Baby Belly
Rob Deering is not very funny, but he is clever. His hour of stand-up,
which actually has very little to do with breasts (He admits that the
title was just to allow for an eye-catching poster of his head on a
voluptuous body), is at its weakest when he tries to tell jokes or
funny stories. He does have a good line in song parodies, however, and
a range of foot pedals that enable him to record loops, overdub and
otherwise inventively enhance his singing and guitar playing. Turning a
Johnny Cash standard into a paean to Edinburgh or a romantic song into
a celebration of tortoises entertains an audience enough to carry
Deering over tired material about how lads' magazines are sexist, girl
band members are dim and rap lyrics can be unpleasant. By the time he
brings an audience member onstage and, using his bank of electronic
enhancements, makes her into a passable back-up drummer, he's won the
house over and can send them out happily, not aware or caring that
there wasn't one actual good joke in the hour. Gerald
Berkowitz

Diary of a Nobody
C Venue
The key to Charles Pooter, George Grossmith's classic little man, is
not dullness or pomposity, but his complete lack of self-awareness, and
Clive Ward captures that essential innocence perfectly in this modest
but delightful piece. Because Ward's all-but-faceless Victorian clerk
has no idea when he is being dull or pompous, the failings become
endearing, because he doesn't realise when others are insulting or
patronising him, he can go through life with an almost unblemished
happiness, and because he never censors himself, his moments of pure
joy are deeply affecting. Wood catches all of this in a delightful
comic characterisation, ably supported by Kirsty Bennett as ever-loving
and only occasionally dubious Mrs. Pooter and by Timothy Muller at an
atmosphere-setting piano. An inventive exploitation of a side note in
the book that Mrs P used to enjoy amateur theatricals prompts the very
funny device of having everyone else played by Bennett as Mrs. Pooter
playing everyone else. There may be few belly laughs here, but lots of
warm smiles and chuckles. Gerald
Berkowitz

Diet of Worms: Friends of
the Puffincat Gilded Balloon
With a sketch show supposedly revolving around a 1979 Soviet cartoon
character but featuring a variety of equally bizarre takes on Brit Pop,
Steven Hawking and Tom Cruise, this five-strong comedy ensemble from
Dublin could easily pass for Ireland's answer to Idiots of Ants. There
is an easy flow to the show as a whole, aided by a good sense of rhythm
and comic timing throughout, and their audience rapport is so good that
they'll even pull off an attempt at a random egg cell insemination, and
get away with it. Following that, getting the entire audience to read a
part in a sketch in unison is a piece of cake. And of course they
wouldn't be Irish if they didn't have a musical number or two to show
for it. You'll have to wait all the way to the end for a rather
delightful highlight of 'Miss Kate Nash's song about being a plaster' -
but rest assured that it is well worth the wait. Duska
Radosavljevic

Domestic Goddi Pleasance
Comedy double acts usually come together when the individual members
somehow complement each other. Think Laurel and Hardy, or French and
Saunders - not only are both partners visually easy to distinguish, but
very often one is smarter than the other. To an extent Rosie Wilkinson
and Helen O'Brien have got a handle on this principle too. One is tall
and grumpy and the other is short and sweet. However, they seem to be
at a point where they are still too nice to each other to be
capitalising on their differences and establishing a clear power
dynamic between themselves. They take it in turns to outwit each other
and very often they just end up assuming the same comedy voice - as for
example when they are firing witty one-liners at us as the 'nifty at
fifty' compares Joan and Jean. One thing that really weakens their act
is the tendency to milk each punchline to death or just over-exhaust a
particular idea or a device. Certainly they seem to be brimming with
ideas and potential, but a bit more tenacity, hard work and stamina
would really improve their act further. Duska Radosavljevic

Nick Doody
Pleasance
His show title, Tour of Doody, is not just an acceptable pun but also a
hint at the contents, since this amiable and quick-thinking stand-up
comic does not follow the current trend of building his whole act
around a single theme, but rather meanders through his thoughts on a
wide range of topics, from the professional calm of driving instructors
to racism in Star Trek. As even that pair suggests, his mode is not so
much to break new comic ground as to find new gold in previously mined
material, and other familiar topics that he manages to make fresh
include the English abroad, blokish behaviour and the names of death
metal bands. Some themes do recur, and the hour gradually finds a focus
of sorts around religion, names and teddy bears, separately or in
unexpected combinations, beginning with his take on the story of the
teacher who got in trouble by letting her class choose their bear's
name and ending with a singalong to a particularly warped version of
The Teddy Bears' Picnic. Though his method sometimes seems random and
scattershot, Doody moves around fast enough and hits enough of his
targets to make his hour more satisfying that some comics who have to
devote much of their time to setting up an elaborate premise.Gerald
Berkowitz

Dragon Lady
C Soco
Anna May Wong was the Chinese-American actress who was Hollywood's
Oriental vamp of choice during the 1930s and 1940s but who, like many
other film performers of the period, was typecast and limited by the
studios' and public's perception of her. In her case, of course, there
was a element of racism, which she felt from both sides, as the Chinese
community criticised her for feeding prejudice in her stereotyped
roles. Writer-actress Alice Lee presents some of this story in a
depiction of Wong as a confused, alcoholic shell, unhappy with the
limits on her career but pleased with the luxuries it has bought, proud
of her few substantial roles but resentful at her restraints. It is
particularly galling that she lost out the best-written Chinese role of
her time, in The Good Earth, to an Austrian actress, Louise Rainer. Lee
is more successful at showing us the wreck she imagines Wong as
becoming than at capturing the dignity she frequently showed onscreen
or the strength it must have taken her to rise and survive in
Hollywood, and some audiences may have difficulties with Lee's accent,
ironically much thicker than Wong's. Gerald
Berkowitz

A Drunk Woman Looks At The
Thistle Assembly Denise Mina's very
free adaptation of Hugh MacDairmid's 1925 classic 'A Drunk Man...,'
takes the same stance, of an assertively common and excluded voice
expressing contempt for most establishment icons and attempts to define
Scottishness. Mina's speaker is a downmarket urban hausfrau well into
her bottle of flavoured gin, whose lips are loosened by the liquor and
the awareness that nobody will listen to her anyway. So she is free to
criticise and ridicule the posh and the politicians, the arty and the
antiquarians. She fights to recapture the earthy Robbie Burns from the
academics while dismissing the poseur Scott with disdain. She is as
contemptuous of the imitation English as of those who cry for
separatism with no idea of what to do next - all in a voice whose
potentially vicious anger is muted by an irrepressible sense of the
ridiculous and a healthy vulgarity. Stand-up comic Karen Dunbar plays
the woman with high energy and a balance of outrage, humour and good
sense. Quite deliberately, her accent is sometimes incomprehensible to
non-Scots (This was true of MacDairmid's poem too), and she constantly
risks going way over the top with a new gesture, pose or facial
expression for every line. But the poem's and the performer's vulgar
love of what they celebrate as true Scottishness generate a memorable
and enjoyable hour. Gerald Berkowitz

The Durham Revue
Underbelly
In recent years Durham has been the only non-Oxbridge university to
continue to carry the flag for revue, and I am delighted to report
that, even in a year when both Oxford and Cambridge delivered their
best showing for a long time, Durham still outshines them both with an
hour of genuinely clever and witty comedy. As I've written before, it
is easy to come up with the idea for a sketch, but very much harder to
produce two-to-five minutes of actual funniness based on the idea.
Virtually every one of Durham's sketches scores, either by developing
its premise in inventive ways, or by suddenly veering off premise into
unexpected and delightful new territory. A twenty-year reunion of Mr.
Men, the source of the Daily Mail's most scabrous headlines, strip
Monopoly, unlikely superheroes, a radio drama gone amok - any of these
ideas could have proven to be dry wells to less inventive minds, but
every one is hilarious, and most have the added bonuses of throwaway
lines or passing bits of business that are funny in themselves. Skip
Oxbridge, do not pass Go, and move directly to Durham for a delightful
hour of revue comedy. (And guys, if you quote me again in your ads and
listings, get the attribution right.) Gerald Berkowitz

Britt Ekland - Britt on
Britt Assembly
Perennial starlet and sequential wife and/or lover of the famous, the
still-beautiful-at-65 Britt Ekland takes us through her life and loves
in an hour marred only by a somewhat mechanical delivery and a
meandering, disorganised structure. Ekland is clearly reciting a
memorised script throughout, and is unable to make it sound natural,
while the occasional fumbling for a line makes her seem to have
forgotten her own life. She does drop as many names as you could wish,
from husbands Peter Sellers and Rod Stewart through Frank Sinatra,
Steve McQueen, Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor, Princess Margaret and
Cher, with Sellers coming out the worst. Ekland doesn't really have
much to say about her career, remembering the pleasures of exotic
locations more than the filming itself, and most of the images
projected on the screen above her are domestic snapshots or glamour
photos, though she does show the infamous nude scene from The Wicker
Man and point out exactly where the body double replaces her. Near the
end of her show she runs through a list of her almost 100 films, and
once she gets past James Bond, Get Carter and The Wicker Man you won't
have heard of any of them. And that's the ultimate impression Ekland's
memoirs give, of a beautiful woman who hung out with - and frequently
loved - lots of stars without really being one. Gerald
Berkowitz

Everyone We Know
C venue
Unspoken Agreement is a company of young artists who claim to be
committed to innovation. In this show, which they have billed as a
piece of dance/physical theatre, their two performers are mostly
perched on and around seven TV sets using a camera to occasionally zoom
in on their body parts or random audience members in between playing
pre-recorded footage of a weight-loss diary or reciting poetry which
culminates with lines such as 'I vomit rainbows' and 'I can set fire to
houses with my toenails'. Admittedly, I am taking this out of context,
but I am not even sure what the context of the piece is anyway. Sure,
the Fringe exists for all sorts of experimentation and artistic
conviction - and over the years we have repeatedly seen a lot of
similar endeavours. However, a piece like this really raises the
question of how people decide that something is deserving of an
audience. What are the criteria they employ? What makes them think that
anyone would care or want to pay the money to see what they've got to
show? Answers in a new show, please. Duska Radosavljevic

Face in The Crowd
Underbelly
You know that the boundaries of individual genres have well and truly
been moved when there comes a show that is difficult to define in the
existing terms. KUDOS, the company of twelve performers and two
co-creators - producer Ben Clare and director Matthew Dye - have
categorised their piece as physical theatre. And here is finally a
generation which has inherited and internalised the DV8 theatre-making
ethos and made it their own rather than merely just emulating the
recognisable tropes. However, their piece is dramaturgically and
narratively coherent in a way that is uncharacteristic of a lot of
contemporary physical theatre and dance. Each of the twelve members of
the titular faceless 'crowd' have a journey that is clear and easily
readable by the audience without any abstraction or ambiguity. In
addition, a series of easily recognisable situations from London's
everyday life - underground trains, streets, offices, gyms, bars and
nightclubs - forms a single day cycle and is recreated in astute and
highly evocative detail with an excellent sense of originality and
humour. All of this definitely makes KUDOS a crowd to watch. Duska
Radosavljevic

The FactoryPleasance If ever there was a
show with its heart in the right place but its brain out of joint, this
is it. Steve Lambert's Badac Company has attempted to re-create the
experience of being a Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The
message of telling the world is absolutely right, and as the inmates
stand in the gas chamber defiantly singing a song that is now the
national anthem of Israel - a land they would never see - one begins to
feel the terror and sadness of the millions lost in the Holocaust.
However, for far too much of the hour-long Concentration Camp
Experience, the team works too hard to shock in ways that fail to
convince. While their lines lack fluency, you cannot fault the
commitment and effort of these actors who will have put on a lot of
muscle by the end of the run. They bang metal plates for an age and
then repeatedly shout expletive-littered orders until they cease to
have any meaning. An inevitable problem is that though you follow and
mingle with the inmates, there has of necessity to be a distinction
between those who will move on to the next show and those cremated and
lost forever. This is a noble idea and even with its limitations, the
final message of remembering the Holocaust and enabling others to do so
in order to stop it happening again is as important today as ever.
Philip Fisher

Fall Traverse
Political theatre, or any sort of thesis-driven drama, is very
difficult to pull off, the inherent danger being the failure to clothe
the ideas and arguments in living and sympathetic human characters. It
is very clear what Zinnie Harris's play is about and what she thinks
about it, but it is much harder to believe in or care about the people
she has created to embody or express them. In a country whose
oppressive regime has just been overthrown, members and functionaries
of the old government are being tried and executed. The shaky new
government chooses a woman of the people to be the ultimate judge, but
both she and the weak new President begin to question the morality of
justice based on vengeance, with tragic results. Yes, the author agrees
with them, but all the efforts of director Dominic Hill and a cast led
by Geraldine Alexander and Darrell D'Silva can't make any of these
characters seem real or inspire us to care about them. And purely
domestic elements like the President's marital problems or the woman's
discovery that her late husband was one of the criminals seem awkwardly
grafted on to a play whose head and heart are somewhere else.
Gerald Berkowitz

Finished With Engines Traverse Alan
McKendrick's two-hander comes from Glasgow's Arches Theatre, with
actors - Stephanie Viola and Drew Friedman - from New York's Riot
Group, and it has the air of political thesis and intense psychological
drama characteristic of both. In a series of short scenes we watch two
sailors at an offshore observation station while away the hours and
days as a barbaric civil war goes on in the unnamed country they're
watching and their superiors back home make up their minds whether to
just nuke them all into submission. So there are three central threads
to the play - the way familiarity has led to the sailors' nonchalance
about the atrocities they watch onshore, the way boredom and inactivity
inevitably generate a sort of madness, and the dangers of getting what
you wish for. The play evidently thinks itself more of a black comedy
than it is, with only one scene, in which they try to one-up each other
in tales of misery, generating any humour. Instead, for most of it
McKendrick, serving as his own director, does not really conquer the
challenge of depicting boredom without being boring, but at just one
hour the play doesn't outstay its welcome or dissipate its energies. Gerald
Berkowitz

Tim Fitzhigham - The Bard's
Fool Pleasance
Tim Fitzhigham
is one of those comics who spends part of the year doing something
bizarre and then builds a show around it. In the past he's rowed across
the English Channel and marched through Don Quixote country in full
armour. (These are generally sponsored charity challenges, so he does
some good as well as collecting comic material.) This year he was
inspired by the Elizabethan actor Will Kemp's feat of morris dancing
from London to Norwich and set off to duplicate the adventure. Some may
remember that Chris Goode did a show based on this premise a few years
ago, but I always suspected that Goode's journey was fictional, while
Fitzhigham has the video evidence of himself, in full morris gear,
prancing and then struggling his way along. Along the way he encounters
hecklers, incredulous police, over-hospitable hosts, and the Lord
Mayors of several towns, all on display and all described with the
wild-eyed enthusiasm that is Tim's natural mode. What keeps this from
being just plain weird is that Tim is an excellent storyteller, well
aware of how mad he is, but equally insightful about the absurdities he
encounters. Gerald Berkowitz

Flanders and Swann
Pleasance(Reviewed at a previous Festival)
This salute to the duo who pioneered genteel song-and-patter comedy in
the 1950s is a delight that does not rely on nostalgia or even
knowledge of the originals for the fun, though I must admit I was
surprised that everyone in the audience, young and old, could join in
the chorus of the Hippopotamus Song ('Mud, mud, glorious mud...')
without prompting. Perhaps it's one of those things, like the Goon Show
voices and the Dead Parrot sketch that have entered the British DNA.
Duncan Walsh Atkins, quietly droll at the piano, and Tim Fitzhigham,
boisterously welcoming at the microphone and singing in an attractive
baritone, take us through a dozen F&S classics, from the
aforementioned Hippo through Have Some Madeira M'Dear, Transports of
Delight and I'm a Gnu. Tim's intersong chatter is new but fully in the
F&S mode, taking on the blimpish persona of a Kensington Tory
deigning to work alongside his south-London accompanist, and the moment
in which he plays a french horn concerto by blowing into one end of a
music stand is truly remarkable. All together now, 'I'm a gnu, a
gnother gnu....' Gerald Berkowitz

Funk It Up About Nothin' George
Square
The Chicago Shakespeare Theatre and the writing brothers known only as
GQ and JQ, who created the hilarious Bomb-itty of Errors a few seasons
back by setting Shakespeare's words to a DJ's beat, now filter Much Ado
About Nothing through that same lens of hip-hop and rap, with equally
delightful results that only the most humourless pedant could resist.
Recognising that there is in fact a close similarity between
Shakespeare's verse and the rhyme and rhythm schemes of rap, the
writers are able to incorporate whole chunks of the original dialogue
alongside their updated (and, it must be said, appropriately earthy)
language, adding to the fun. In this version Benedick is a member of
Don Pedro's rap crew returning from a successful tour, Beatrice is a
big mama full of attitude, Hero is the complete airhead you always
suspected she was, the watch are as camp as they are confused, and
everybody gets down to the beat of an onstage DJ, so that it makes
perfect sense, for example, for Benedick and Beatrice to spar through
the rhyming braggadocio and put-downs of rap. The two central plots, of
tricking the antagonists into falling in love, and of convincing the
rather dim Claudio that Hero is an unfit bride, translate nicely into
modern terms, while adding to the general air of unpretentious fun are
the quick changes and transparency of the fact that the cast of six all
double and redouble roles. Postell Pringle's manly Don Pedro is
replaced as necessary by a Verges who got his image of a policeman from
the Village People, while Jackson Doran's appropriately out of his
depth white-boy-rapper Claudio gives way to a rip-roaring judge, and
co-author and co-director GQ switches back and forth between grumbling
roadie Don John, retired DJ Leonato and wild west sheriff Dingleberry.
Co-creator JQ's Benedick and Ericka Ratcliff's MC Lady B naturally
dominate things, but scene after scene is stolen by Stephanie Kim's
delightfully dim Hero and especially GQ's spirited Leonato. The rhymes
are funny, the characterisations are funny, and the whole thing is
remarkably true to the spirit of the original. Gerald
Berkowitz

Ginger and Black
Pleasance Dome
Their name might sound like an expensive brand of chocolate, but the
moment you step into their show you'll know that 'sweet' is the last
word Ginger and Black will let anywhere near them. In fact, rather
refreshingly, they furrow their brows and keep scowling all the way
through the show, while rendering deadpan one-liners and bold choruses
of their songs. No danger of being cheered on or required to laugh and
clap in this show - though laugh and clap you will, of course.
Multi-talented Eri ('the ginger half') carries the show through a
series of seamless guitar numbers, while dashing Daniel ('the black
half') punctuates those with occasional poetry and prose - but mostly
they sing together or just finish each other's sentences. Though the
show culminates in their tongue-in-cheek attempt to sell themselves as
a - potentially lethal - children's entertainment act, I'm sure they'd
be a hit with grumpy teenagers the world over. In any case, however,
they are a true delicacy of the musical comedy circuit and to be
savoured after dinner in small pieces. Duska Radosavljevic

Global
Warming is Gay C venue The
hero of this story of social aspiration is Andy, a 'handsome man'
caught between two lovely ladies and his brother, the gay and green MSP
Graham Orbison. In order to win his brother's approval, Andy recruits
his new girlfriend's family resources as a means to convert their home
into a carbon-free paradise. It is not long before living coat-stands,
organic furniture and bicycle-powered turbines enter their natural
habitat and matters of 'planetary significance' take precedence over
all mundane issues concerning quality of interpersonal relationships.
Iain Heggie's script is great fun, being peopled with engaging
characters and peppered with juicy one-liners. It is only the awkward
exits and entrances that betray this play's origins as Ostrovskian
satirical farce. But at least the narrative gains a spring in its step
as a result of this heritage, and Heggie's interventions, bringing the
narrative into present day Scotland, are positively inspired. Its
central themes of personal and political hypocrisy are also effectively
adapted from the play's distant originator, thus serving to both revive
an interest in the classic and introduce a brand new manifestation of
some age-old concerns. Duska Radosavljevic

Stefan Golaszewski Speaks
About a Girl He Once Loved Pleasance
This might have been an unlikely winner of a coveted first week Fringe
First, but it fully deserves the award. In many ways, Stefan
Golaszewski's strength is in his carefully cultivated artlessness.
Again and again, he deliberately chooses the wrong word or phrase,
often accompanied by a pause for the realistic effect to sink in. This
gives his tale a true feel of lived experience. The story is simple
enough. The 18-year-old Golaszewski is having a night out with his pals
and the intensely dislikeable Jenna-Louise when a perfect 10 comes into
the pub. He sidles up and, after seducing her with a pack of pork
scratchings, they embark on a speeded up love affair that lasts no more
than 24 hours. The writer/performer's strength is in persuading his
audience that every word that he says and every action that he
describes actually happened. This is a rarer talent than one would
imagine, as is proved far too often by pale imitations throughout
Edinburgh. By the end, you really care about the fate of this insecure
youngster and the lovely Betty. Indeed, it is just a pity that she was
indisposed, as every man present would love to meet such a rare and
charming beauty. Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About a Girl He Once Loved
may not have the snappiest title in town but it is amongst this year's
highlights. Philip Fisher

Ha Ha Hamlet Gilded Balloon A trio of
experienced street performers bring their act indoors in this
fast-moving potted version of Hamlet. Of course the idea isn't new -
among other precedents are Tom Stoppard's Ten-Minute Hamlet and the
long-running Complete Works of Shakespeare Abridged - and some of the
gags are predictable. Lines are going to be mangled or misapplied, much
is going to be made of the guy in a wig playing Ophelia, and the
climactic duel is going to turn into slapstick. And indeed those things
appear on cue. But there are enough new twists to satisfy most, like
turning the players into Julian and Sandy, doing Ophelia's mad scene as
an escape from a straitjacket or sprinkling the text with dreadful puns
(What's afoot? Twelve inches.). The street theatre roots are evident in
requiring the audience to contribute some sound effects, though more of
that sort of involvement would have been welcome. It may be the switch
to a stage and the need to fill an hour, but the whole seems a bit too
leisurely and not laugh-a-second enough to hold an outdoor audience,
and those who have paid to see what others got for free might find it a
bit thin. Gerald Berkowitz

Happy Savages
Underbelly
Ryan Craig's play of romantic and sexual entanglements is conceived and
advertised as a dark comedy. But the comic elements are far too few,
and what is intended as irony turns into mere soap opera. We meet two
young couples, each unhappy enough in vaguely undefined ways that one
husband and the other wife have a one-night affair and then foolishly
confess it. Both couples break up and reform with switched partners,
only to discover that they're all even more unhappy in the new
configuration. There are a few mild laughs along the way, usually in
such askew but believable lines as 'It's only since I was unfaithful
that I've stopped trusting him.' But the general tone is bleak and the
narrative melodramatic. A bit of jumping around in time - for example,
flashing back to the innocent first meetings after we've seen the later
wreckage - seems a strained imitation of Pinter's Betrayal and an
unsuccessful attempt to underline obvious ironies. The four actors
struggle not to fall into stock characterisations or soap opera
overacting. Gerald Berkowitz

Heart and Sole
Gilded Balloon
As both writer and performer, Lynn Ferguson achieves the wondrous feat
of creating a skewed reality and making it seem absolutely solid and
normal, even as we laugh at its absurdities. At the centre of her tale
is a schoolteacher - an episode in a classroom is one of the comic
highlights - who visits an aquarium one day and develops a deep and
spiritual romantic connection with a fish. There is something both
terribly sad and terribly funny about this, but as she describes her
love with the calm sincerity of the truly mad, we find ourselves drawn
into her world, as does the initially sceptical friend also played by
Ferguson. There's also a third character, part of a fish-worshiping
cult who latch on to the teacher and drag her along as they storm the
aquarium, but by this point Ferguson has us so completely that we'll
believe anything. It is warm, it is touching and it is very funny -
pure theatrical magic created by a woman on an almost bare stage. Gerald
Berkowitz

Richard Herring - The
Headmaster's Son Underbelly
Adolescent angst, self-dramatisation and sexual insecurity are not
especially original material for stand-up comedy, though Richard
Herring puts them in a fresh context by questioning whether his teenage
experiences, which included being indeed the headmaster's son, turned
him into the unmarried fortyish comedian he is. After careful and comic
analysis of the evidence, the answer turns out to be maybe. Though
Herring can now find all the traumas of his youth comical, he must also
recognise that they weren't particularly traumatic or life-changing.
The picture he creates is of a fairly happy and normal kid who might
just as easily taken some other path in life, except that he did have a
precocious flair for comedy even then. Herring bravely reads from his
teenage diary, taking as much delight in the kid's egocentricity and
pomposity as in his real cleverness. Both the energy level and
Herring's hold on his audience drop significantly toward the end of the
hour as nostalgia and philosophising overpower comedy, and Herring 's
highly polished delivery - not for him any ad libs, audience
interaction or deviations from the memorised script - occasionally
threatens to lapse into rote recitation. Gerald Berkowitz

The Highwayman
C Cubed
Taking inspiration from Alfred Noyes' classic poem, this ambitious
piece of theatre also features abstract film footage and originally
composed music to bring the 18th century cautionary tale closer to a
contemporary audience. Scripted by Bahar Brunton, the six- hander is a
collage of monologues by Bess, the landlord's daughter in love with the
highwayman, and a horse-keeper secretly in love with Bess, mixed in
with a couple of dramatic scenes of violence in the landlord's inn. As
an adaptation exercise, the Curious Room's piece is graced with a
strong sense of the visual and aural aesthetic. However, the action
often seems too crammed on the small stage and the piece's intended
contemporary relevance remains obscured by the sheer power of the
original and the company's enthralling reverence towards it. Admirers
of the poem or those interested in finding out about it will still have
to go away and read the work for themselves, and this piece will
provide a valuable impetus. Those just on the lookout for a good piece
of theatre might be robbed of their expectation. Duska
Radosavljevic

Craig Hill Makes Your Whole
Week Gilded Balloon
Craig Hill has developed such a devoted fan base that the audience
comes in primed to laugh and the comedian could probably get away with
a half-steam show. But he delivers full value for money, both in
prepared material and in ad libs, the latter frequently taking over
most of the hour so that he has to rush toward the end to get in at
least some of what he planned. Hill regulars will know better than to
sit in the front row, or will masochistically choose to, prepared to be
noticed, insulted and made the butt of running gags. Hill is certainly
an unprejudiced insulter, equally harsh on Scots, Brits and Australians
(He didn't encounter any Americans at this show, though I doubt they
would have escaped his wicked wit), on the posh or the Primark shopper,
on straight or gay. Digressions abound, as everything seems to remind
him of a joke he hadn't planned to tell, though one can guess that the
definition of Australians, the Glaswegian BeeGees tribute band and the
trip to the Eurovision Song Contest are likely to recur from night to
night. The accent may occasionally be a bit thick to non-Scots, but
then again one of his running jokes is about how just about anyone in
his audience will be incomprehensible to half the others. Gerald
Berkowitz

How It Ended C
Cubed
A small and inherently realistic story is raised to the level of myth
by the new company You Need Me, employing elements of storytelling,
movement and dance into the performance. During World War Two one of a
family of four Welsh girls meets a French flier, marries him after a
whirlwind romance and then waits as he goes off to fight. He survives
and returns to take her home to France with him, where language and
culture barriers compound the inevitable strains of a marriage of two
people who hardly know each other. The production is at its best in the
first half, evoking both the small world of the Welsh village and the
overpowering intensity of the love affair, but style, language and
performances become somewhat more prosaic and earthbound in the French
section, producing a severe drop in the play's energy and hold on the
audience. It is almost as if the company ran out of inspiration halfway
through, but enough is on show to make one look forward to another
opportunity for them to explore and sustain their inventiveness. Gerald
Berkowitz

I Caught Crabs In
Walberswick Pleasance
Joel Horwood's portrait of small lives in small crises is the best Jon
Godber play not by Jon Godber that I've ever seen. Like the master,
Horwood puts a handful of characters in what should be a light and
harmless setting and then lets the fault lines in their lives begin to
show. Here it's two teenage boys in the titular resort town who are
picked up by a posh girl and led into a night of self-discovery for all
of them. It may come as little surprise that the girl turns out to be
more screwed up than either of the lads, or that all three sets of
parents have disfunctions of their own. But what is a pleasant
revelation is that the boys come to understand that they themselves are
actually in pretty good shape, though their friendship may not be. Lucy
Kerbel directs Horwood's fluid script with high energy that does not
interfere with its sensitivity. Andrew Barron and Rosie Thomson play
all the adults and further double as narrators, while Aaron Foy, Harry
Hepple and Gemma Soul surmount stereotypes to make the teens
recognisable and sympathetic. Gerald Berkowitz

I Love You, Bro Pleasance
Dome
Based on a true story, Adam J. A. Cass's solo play shows us a lonely
teenager absorbed in the world of online chat rooms. When he realises
that he knows one of the other chatters and that the boy thinks he is
exchanging messages with a girl, he is drawn into an ever-more complex
web of fabrications. Barely realising his own homosexual longings, he
begins an online romance in the character of the girl, then has her
introduce him as her brother, then invents a rival boyfriend for her.
By the time he has convinced the other kid that several of the
characters in this construct have been murdered and that he - the other
kid - is being recruited as a government agent, there seems no place
for this fantasist to go but tragedy. Actor Ash Flanders makes the
boy's innocence, lack of self-awareness and incredible imagination and
persuasive powers all real, while keeping us caring for him so that we
dread the direction this is all taking him. Like the character's lies,
the playwright's story eventually gets a little too complicated for him
to control or find a way out of, and the play's ending is both
arbitrary and abrupt, leaving too many questions unanswered. Gerald
Berkowitz

In A Thousand Pieces Gilded
Balloon
The subject is the trafficking, exploitation and abuse of women in the
sex trade. The company is The Paper Birds, committed to a fluid style
that incorporates dance, music and mime with the spoken word. The
result is a frequently evocative, sometimes harrowing and sometimes
ineffective picture of those unfortunates drawn to Britain by hopes of
opportunity and a new life, only to be brutalised and forced into
prostitution. The show opens on a light note, as the three performers -
Elle Moreton, Jemma McDonnell and Kylie Walsh - read from file cards
the words of young women planning trips to Britain, about what they
imagine it to be like and what they hope to do there, and then mime and
dance the wonder of arrival. But then, as recordings give us the words
of the women picked up by the traffickers and repeatedly raped and
beaten into submission, the actresses reflect the story in mime and
dance. At its best, this mode, while not graphic, does capture the
horror of the experience. But at least some of the time it is either
too literal to add much to the recorded accounts or, conversely, too
distanced from what is being described to resonate with it. Some of the
strongest moments have little to do with the company's performance
style - a film showing Brits trying to draw a map of Europe,
demonstrating how unaware of the world outside they are, and the simple
adding up of the number of rapes the typical victim endures in a year. Gerald
Berkowitz

Itsoseng Pleasance Dome
Littered with pieces of windswept newspapers, orange skins and urban
debris, this 'forgotten piece of space' is Itsoseng, a South African
township whose name means 'wake yourself up'. A fitting name for a play
which, by way of rendering a story of doomed love, becomes an epitaph
to an entire generation of young people whose lives have been destroyed
by wrong politicians having the power, deluded revolutionaries having a
gift of the gab and ruined economy having no chance of renewal. Mawilla
is a local dagga-smoking young man, hopelessly in love with Dolly, his
childhood sweetheart whose life is being destroyed by prostitution. The
author and performer of this solo piece, an immensely talented
twenty-four year old Omphile Molusi - who is from Itsoseng himself -
imbues his storyteller with a perfect combination of vigour and
tenderness, understated charm and characteristic indolence. Equally
layered and evocative are each of his depictions of other invisible
characters, from fat-cat politicians and failed revolutionaries to
ignorant newsreaders and various lost souls and Itsoseng passer-bys on
their way to a funeral. Mawilla is on his way to the funeral too, but
he has stopped in his tracks in order to tell us his story. And by the
end of it - out of the debris around him and the remnants of his hope -
he has somehow managed to build a small, beautiful shrine to his lost
love and his thwarted dreams. Duska Radosavljevic

Jesus: The Guantanamo YearsUnderbelly (Reviewed
at a previous Festival)
Abie Bowman deserves a comic sainthood simply for the idea of Jesus
Christ as a Middle East terrorist suspect incarcerated in Guantanamo's
Camp X-Ray. In fact, Our Saviour has just escaped and hotfooted it
across the water to Edinburgh to continue the greatest stand-up story
ever told. He's back on the road, recapturing the success of his first
tour 2000 years ago when he wowed the crowds with the loaves and fishes
trick amongst others. He admits that attitudes have changed. He's still
trying to claim royalties on the Bible and moans about the use of his
copyrighted material in Monty Python's Life of Brian, threatening to
tell John Cleese jokes in revenge. Health and safety considerations
mean that his stigmata have had to go while he acknowledges that in
pre-Aids days the idea of a billion Catholics drinking his blood every
week wouldn't have been considered a problem. He has also discovered
that the modern world is not quite geared up towards anyone with a
beard presenting themselves at a US airport without proper ID after
emerging from a cave in Palestine. You can see the problem - as did the
American authorities who promptly packed him off him to Guantanamo
where the Americans panic after thinking all the Muslim detainees are
on hunger strike only to be told it's Ramadan. Like all good stand-ups,
Jesus's own personal life comes up for scrutiny - his aged father, for
example, gives him grief by refusing to retire - while politics also
suffuses the laid-back observations. In the fight against terror, he
idly calculates the amount of airplanes Al-Qaeda needs to blow up to
match the mind-numbing statistics of deaths caused by medical
malpractice in the USA each year. Bowman's kosher beard, deadpan Irish
tones and gently barbed delivery ensure that the irony never gets in
the way of the laughs. Funny, thoughtful, impassioned and one
white-knuckle joke make this a classic encounter that should be made
required viewing for all. Nick Awde

Jumping The Shark
C Cubed
A sketch show driven by an attractively askew sense of humour, Jumping
The Shark is an object lesson in the potentials and pitfalls of sketch
shows. Coming up with a wild or clever idea is only the first step, and
the hard part is putting together a sketch that is actually as funny as
the premise seemed to promise. Sometimes the company get it right, as
in the portrait of Tom Cruise and Will Smith as camp luvies, and
sometimes the joke turns out not to be there after all, as in the idea
of football hiring and firing as lovers' tiffs. The randy invisible
goose, the beach voyeur and the mascot for Obama sketches peter out
without finding their joke; the rich kids spending their gap year in a
war zone, the overzealous neighbourhood watch and the chain reaction of
disasters take their clever ideas to funny places. Overall, the success
rate is probably better than most, with the actually funny bits
carrying the show over the weak stretches. Gerald
Berkowitz

The Just in Case
Gilded Balloon
If you'd expected a children's show revolving around clever wordplay,
you'd do well to reconsider whether this is the right choice for you.
Created by dancer Sarah Swinfield, scenographer Chan Vi and theatre
designer Clare Seviour, the piece is entirely non-verbal and highly
visual but still quite playful and aimed at a young audience. According
to their publicity, the show has been designed around different objects
that people carry 'just in case' - mostly ropes, rags and trinkets,
though a converted umbrella, a big magnifying glass and a string of
ballet-shoes also make an appearance. One would imagine that a workshop
package entailing the making of sequinned insects and colourful puppets
would form a much more effective use of this company's resources,
although Swinfield is a highly watchable performer. Perhaps
Ambidextrous does need to bring a director or a dramaturge on board to
really make their ideas work more theatrically and to make the right
steps towards creating a brand new audience for non-verbal storytelling
and physical theatre. Duska Radosavljevic

Kit and the Widow Stage
By Stage
The veteran cabaret duo, now in their 29th visit to the Fringe, give
their loyal fans, median age somewhere north of bus passes, exactly
what they come for - witty songs, unthreatening camp and an hour of
jolly fun. As always Kit (Kit Hesketh-Harvey) does most of the singing
as the Widow (Richard Sisson) plays the piano. This time around, recent
news stories lead to the Von Trapped Family, a string of Sound of Music
parodies set in an Austrian cellar, and from there to a song about how
Andrew Lloyd Webber produces musicals by everyone but himself. National
and Scottish politics get a look-in, the Widow sings a couple of songs
about soup, and he and an audience volunteer subvert Kit's mock
attempts at German lieder. One wonders whether all of what Kit calls
the Edinbourgoisie catch passing references to sleeping like a top or
kissing someone's ring, but the camp itself is as much a put-on as the
songs. Fans of Flanders and Swann or Fascinating Aida will probably
have found K&W already; if not, they will almost certainly
prove very much to your taste. Gerald Berkowitz

Lie of the Land Pleasance Torben Betts'
new two-hander starts strong but repeatedly loses its focus, deciding
halfway through that it is not about what it seemed to be about at all,
but something else, and then making that decision yet again near its
end. As a result, none of its three ostensible purposes is fully met,
and the audience is in danger of leaving not sure what any of it was
really meant to be about. We meet a couple as they are moving into a
lovely country home and the start of what they imagine to be a
wonderful new life, but of course cracks in their relationship and
their dream soon appear, and we settle in to watch them fall apart. But
then suddenly Betts introduces apocalyptic rains and flooding that lead
to panicked rioting and looting, and the play loses interest in the
couple's marriage to become an end-of-the-world fable. And then gears
shift once again, as Betts declares it all an allegory of middle-class
compacency. Director Adam Barnard can't hold it all together, and
directing Neal Barry and Nia Gwynne to overact and underdevelop their
characters doesn't help. Gerald Berkowitz

Life at the Molecular Level
Underbelly
There are indications, primarily in their publicity, that this
group-created work began as a rumination on the subjects of isolation
and the inexorable passage of time. But the three writer-performers
seem to have been distracted by their infatuation with their own
cleverness, so that most traces of the theme and all traces of clear
communication were sacrificed to their self-adulation. Put another way,
the three guys onstage enjoy themselves immensely showing off, with
little regard for whether the audience will have as much fun as they or
have any idea of what they are up to. The three dance in their
underwear to music only they can hear. They take turns cooking ready
meals in microwaves, wearing silly hats, and singing Karaoke. In bits
and pieces they tell the story of the man who parachuted from the
greatest height. There is also a briefer account of the man who walked
a tightrope between the World Trade Center buildings and a vaguely
accurate summary of Melville's story Bartleby the Scrivener.
Throughout, they affect the gimmick of stopping, rewinding and
repeating dialogue when they supposedly go wrong. Yes, somewhere in
there are symbols of time passing and the narratives do deal with men
in isolation, but it may be significant that no director is credited,
suggesting that the three creators had no one to tell them how little
of their intention was coming through their self-indulgence. Gerald
Berkowitz

Lost In The Wind
Zoo
Lost Spectacles, an attractive young company from Bristol, have put
together a mainly mime programme of physical humour and
atmosphere-setting stage pictures that is not quite as original or
coherent as they may think. Reading their press release sometime after
seeing the show, I was surprised to discover that it was meant to have
a plot of sorts because, although a few characters reappear in more
than one sequence, the hour plays like a string of self-contained mime
sketches loosely tied by the theme of weather. Figures take turns
coping with blown-away newspapers, playing with balloons, walking into
the wind, shivering in the cold, and so on, with the performers
apparently not realising that much of what they do is a minor variant
on standard street mime stuff, with the unfair advantage of an actual
wind machine and barrels of artificial snow. The performer-creators
have yet to find either the technical proficiency or the ability to
communicate their intentions that will move them beyond what play like
a series of occasionally lovely or comic classroom exercises. Gerald
Berkowitz

Lough/Rain
Underbelly
This double bill of plays authored by two different writers uses the
same characters, Caoimhe and Michael, whose love for each other is
tested by a terrible accident. Declan Feenan's Lough is an intriguing
and deeply poetic study of dreams drowned in domesticity, focusing on
the morning before the accident. A sense of foreboding, mistrust and
guilt vaguely suggested by the script is heightened by director Dan
Sherer's atmospheric world which he has woven around the characters
using predominantly the resources of silence and pre-recorded sound.
Clara Brennan's piece entitled Rain takes place in a residential care
home after the accident. Deriving a lot of drama from the given conceit
itself, Brennan then turns her attention to the ways in which, for the
sake of sanity, the characters struggle to hold on to the measurable
values, but also to each other, even if against the odds. Actors Kate
Donmall and Jot Davies deliver consistent, engaging and often very
powerful performances throughout both pieces, thus giving a very strong
throughline to the double bill as a whole. Sombre but accomplished. Duska
Radosavljevic

Lucky Nurse and Other Short
Musical Plays C Cubed
This programme of four mini-musicals by Michael John LaChiusa
introduced the composer-lyricist who went on to be one of the most
promising new Broadway talents of the 1990s. They prove to be an
excellent showcase for his talent and for the performers in them, with
a range of topics, tones and musical styles. LaChiusa hadn't fully
found his own voice at this point, and inevitably was under the
inescapable influence of Stephen Sondheim, so the first piece, 'Eulogy
For Mister Hamm,' in which the residents of a rooming house kvetch
comically about their landlord, is made up musically of what sound like
out-takes from Company. 'Break' is also little more than a blackout
joke, as two construction workers have a supernatural visitation they
decide to pretend never happened. But 'Agnes' is a touching little play
about a disabled woman who senses the true ghostly identity of a
would-be mugger and lets him know she's ready for him. 'Lucky Nurse' is
the most ambitious of the plays, following a string of lonely people as
they don't quite make contact with each other on a sad and rainy night.
Of the four attractive performers Dominic Brewer is clearly the
strongest, both musically and dramatically. Lucy Barnett is a fine
singing actress, but she has evidently never been taught to project,
and is too frequently inaudible from six feet away. Gerald
Berkowitz